Fascist Eva Bartlett & several American Stalinists, including Max Blumenthal & Ben Norton, went to Venezuela & found a worker’s paradise with no dissent. Médecins Sans Frontières medical staff report a very different situation with 600 fleeing “crisis-ridden Venezuela” every day for shelters, abandoned houses, & homelessness in Brazil. Who is it wiser to believe?
https://www.msf.org/struggle-venezuelan-migrants-and-asylum-seekers-northern-brazil?
There will be a #StandWithKashmir rally in Palmerston North city New Zealand, Sunday, August 25th from 2pm to 4 pm.
Those organizing the rally would like to connect with other Kashmiris or supporters in New Zealand, like the ones who organized the Auckland rally. You can contact Sadaf Nakash at https://www.facebook.com/sadaf.naqash
There’s a genocide alert on for Kashmir. Nothing should deter us from building a #BoycottIndia movement for the thousands of products India exports to at least 200 countries. They are ubiquitous in health food stores, supermarkets, specialty stores, gift shops, Amazon. They include skin care oils & lotions, Ayurvedic goods, pharmaceuticals, vitamins & supplements, scarves & clothing of all kinds, foodstuffs of all kinds (especially rice & grains), jewelry, leather goods, textiles, electronics, Bollywood films, tourism.
A boycott would reinforce #StandWithKashmir protests with direct economic & political pressure on India to withdraw the troops, release political prisoners, halt the use of pellet guns, forcible disappearances, rape as a weapon of war, indiscriminate shooting of unarmed protesters, hunt to kill operations. It would also tangentially, or maybe not so tangentially, fortify the Palestinian BDS movement because of India’s political & military ties to Israel, especially in their occupation & colonialism strategies.
We shouldn’t just stop buying the products but should notify the enterprises that we are refusing to buy Indian goods to support the Kashmiri struggle. (You might not want to say that directly to an Indian shopkeeper who could be a Hindutva nutcase, but notify them by letter.) For those who say this will hurt Indian workers, our response is that nothing hurts Indian workers more than Indian militarism. A boycott has the best interests of both Indian & Kashmiri workers at heart. Those primarily hurt by a boycott would be Indian capitalists. Try not to cry me a river.
I love many Indian products & buy & use them all the time. Or at least, did. But the issue of genocide preempts everything. It is a matter of solidarity with one of the most important freedom struggles of our times.
#BoycottIndia
It looks like a boycott of India has already begun ad hoc. This shopkeeper in the UK trashed Indian goods he was going to sell & refuses to sell any more.
If you want to see what loyalty to #Kashmir looks like, look no further.
A shopkeeper in UK registers his protest against #India & #Modi by trashing Indian goods he has bought to sell.
He refuses to sell Indian goods.
He has decided to #BoycottIndia.
Be like chacha. pic.twitter.com/NwrmfXJJGb
— Muzzammil Ayyub Thakur (@M_A_Thakur) August 13, 2019
News video on the Soura neighborhood of Srinagar, called by residents ‘Kashmir’s Gaza’:
VIDEO: In an act of defiance against New Delhi's decision to strip Muslim-majority Indian-administered #Kashmir of its autonomy, the #Soura neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city of #Srinagar has sealed itself off from security forces pic.twitter.com/nFWVidQgie
— AFP news agency (@AFP) August 22, 2019
The Indian Consulate in NY approached the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of New Jersey ostensibly to discuss India’s revocation of Article 370 & the #StandWithKashmir protests. They made the request for a meeting after CAIR NJ asked the New Jersey governor to cancel his scheduled September trip to India because of the siege & blockade of Kashmir.
This is the response sent to the Indian Consulate by CAIR NJ & is the official position of all CAIR chapters which has been released to media outlets as well. It appears a boycott of India is shaping up ad hoc so it may be time to formalize & launch the call.
“Sometimes there is a small chink in the Kashmir blackout and we get gleanings of the people,” writes Freny Manecksha. “I heard they were resisting despite the cage of razor sharp concertina wires, trying to cope amidst shortages of drugs, mass incarceration, excessive force deployed during protests and the presence of almost a million troops ready to kill or blind with pellet guns. I hear the women are standing up and not cowed down, and this, my salute, comes via Rollie Mukherjee’s powerful painting.
“In her own words, here are her thoughts for the painting shared in 2016: ‘Title — Drifting, size 43×29.5 inches, execution 2014… This work shows Kashmiri woman as witness to the gruesome reality that Kashmiri exist in, day-to-day rowing through the misery of death of their dear ones… The carpet conceals the human skeletons… There is an evocation of numbness in this painful stillness. Hence the title frozen. This also defetishises the imposed exotic colonial gaze…'”
#StandWithKashmir #EndTheOccupation
Bollywood is all over Netflix these days portraying Muslims, especially Pakistanis & Kashmiris, in a hateful way. We can launch a boycott there, including notification to Netflix that we will cancel if they don’t get rid of those films.
Any close look a the concept & usage of the term ‘US regime-change operation” shows it to be only thing even approximating a theory among the most demagogic or backward political currents. It substitutes analyses of complex political & social struggles with conspiracy theories involving nefarious forces & intrigues. Those nefarious forces include the CIA, Mossad, Zionists, ‘Islamists’. It’s not that the CIA, et al, are not engaged in undercover destabilizing operations but that proponents of the “US regime-change operation” mantra see all popular struggles against repression as those undercover operations writ large.
The mantra is actually more of a battle cry for right-wing forces posturing as left-wing avant-garde (Stalinists, fascists, Assadists & that political ilk) because most of all, it serves to defend the status quo of state power & repressive regimes & malign popular struggles for democracy, & against war, occupation, & genocide.
This is a three-part series on the siege of Kashmir by Indian journalist Rifat Jawaid based on a recent brief stay in Srinagar. It’s actually quite interesting, from part one which describes Kashmir as ‘hell’, to part three which reports how the CRPF paramilitary have placed J&K police under surveillance, confiscated their weapons, & are heavily guarding police stations because they don’t trust them.